Carolyn Drake’s Haunted Photographs of America’s Borderlands

The photographer Carolyn Drake set out for the U.S.-Mexico border just
after Donald Trump won the Presidency. On the stump, he’d talked
obsessively about building a wall—“big, fat, beautiful”—and Drake was
struck, but not surprised, by its popular reception. “A lot of people in
the U.S. were imagining that idea for a long time,” she told me
recently. “There are people in this country who want to protect
themselves from what they perceive as the dangers of Mexico and
Mexicans, and I wanted to see the place that felt like it needed
protection.” For two weeks, she drove from California to El Paso,
taking pictures of the people, scenes, and landscapes she saw along the way. She
made another trip just after the Inauguration, this time starting in El
Paso and driving east, across Texas. “I felt I could see America better
from a little north of the border,” she said.

Drake’s borderlands are a strange and sometimes disorienting place. In
Glamis, California, she photographed a sandstorm. Suspended in midair, the copper-colored
dirt and swirling dust form what looks
like a natural wall, blocking us off, but it’s hazy and could just as
easily be a mirage. In another image, shot as the sun sinks in the
distance, tire tracks arc to the right while a ray of light cuts
diagonally across them, in the opposite direction. It’s hard to know
which side is Mexico, and which the United States.

Glamis, California, 2016.

Photograph by Carolyn Drake / Magnum

Where is Drake taking us? This is an American project, she told me.
She’s less concerned with who’s crossing to or from Mexico than she is
with who’s already on the American side, living alongside the border as
though wedged between two worlds. That’s one reason why these images
seem bewitched: we are in Limbo. Drake’s scenes, often shot using a
digital camera with a flash propped on a monopod, are lit from the side,
to contribute a vaguely haunting air. When she photographs the hulking,
solid forms of checkpoints and fencing, it’s to conjure their lurking
spirit. The Nogales port of entry, in Arizona, appears at night, with
floodlights beaming down on both sides of the fence. No one is pictured
in the scene, no crossers to experience the full force of American law
and order. The effect is like that of an empty stadium, a monument to
security being played out for its own sake. In the light of day, Drake
trains her lens on the shadow cast by the fence, but not on the
structure itself.

When you study these images closely, you begin to notice that the very
idea of the border suffuses everyone and everything. A border fence,
snaking along a hill in the distance, is echoed, in the foreground, by a
highway’s double yellow line—the kind that drivers aren’t legally
allowed to cross. Two men sit at a table nursing beers, but they, and
their drinks, are separated, as though they’re on opposite sides of an
invisible divide. Kids playing soccer dart across a line painted on the
field; in any other setting, it would be unremarkable, but in Douglas,
Arizona, where the photo was shot, it looks like they’re traversing
something. The same is true for a man in another photo, who sits erect
in a lawn chair with a shotgun on his lap, like a sentry keeping watch.
Without the caption, we’d have no idea that he’s a dove hunter, staking
out his prize. Drake, who describes photography as a hunt for images,
went to the border to lie in wait herself. But she was after a symbol as
much as a place, and its form kept shifting. “Our obsession with the
border has a lot of fantasy involved,” she said. “You’re searching for
something, but it’s not really there.”